Working at Pixar must be wonderful -for all that we’ve learned over the years- but also it surely won’t leave you much time to do another kind of projects, like a personal one. However this wasn’t an obstacle for Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj that dedicated five years of their free time to create Borrowed Time, a fascinating animated short film for adults that finally we get to watch in full.
Coats and Hamou-Lhadj always had in mind making a darker work than they could do in the company. As animated films have become a synonym of children’s movies in the US, proposals like Borrowed Time are really appreciated.
This spectacular short film is slightly under 7 minutes long, but it’s more than enough time for Coats and Hamou-Lhadj to transmit all they want to with this story of a veteran sheriff that returns to where a tragic accident took place and changed his life forever. The short film starts as a western but it doesn’t take much to become a very emotional tale with an extraordinary animation and a soundtrack composed by the several Oscar winning Gustavo Santaolalla.
If you’re curious to know about these two authors’ credentials, Coats participated as animator in Cars 2, Brave, and Inside Out, where he also worked as a character developer. On the other hand, Hamou-Lhadj performed modeling and articulation tasks in Wall-E, Toy Story 3, Brave and The Good Dinosaur.
Will the next step be making their own feature film? Having seen the result of Borrowed Time, surely it won’t take long for them to receive several offers either from Pixar or any other company. We take the opportunity to share with you a brief documentary film where they explain their motivation to create this short film.
